Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Another Excerpt

Thank you guys for your feedback from the last excerpt. This is another excerpt from the book, I can't promise I'll post them too often but every one in a while I'll put one up. I'm not sure when it'll be done, hopefully by the end of the year, thats my goal. But I will keep you posted on my progress. Enjoy!

Her father wanted her out of the house as quickly as possible, so he could spend more money on palm wine and kolanut. In fact, the day she had finished secondary school at the only missionary school in the village, he had knocked out any idea of university from her mind. He had made it clear that he didn’t plan to throw away any more money training a girl to go and marry, regardless of the fact that her results were excellent.

Her mother wanted her to put on more weight, even though Chidi had tried to explain to her that no matter how much she ate she couldn’t get any fatter. Her biology teacher had told her in school about metabolism, but when she had tried to explain it to her mother she had thrown a fit about why the biology teacher was staring at her daughters body, without even giving Chidi a chance to explain that the teacher was female.

Oge always told her to be happy, but as Chidi had been discovering recently, if your idea of happiness didn’t match up to someone elses then they would make it seem like misery until you began to question why it made you happy in the first place. When Chidi was sixteen, she had confided in her friend that Obi the palm wine tappers son had given her chewing gum at school, with a note asking her to be his girlfriend. Oge had laughed till tears came out of her eyes, describing Obi as “that fresh face empty pocket boy”, and advised Chidi to return the chewing gum before Obi got the impression that he had paid a dowry. Initially Chidi hadn’t seen anything wrong with the idea of having a simple existence as a palm wine tappers wife. But her friends’ poisonous laughter had infected the simple happiness of that dream, and Chidi had never been able to see Obi in the same light, no matter how hard she tried.